This is a story that actually started out as a dream and was written up for the purpose of creating history for Advent of the Mists MUD.

Advent of the Mists MUD is currently in active alpha testing, and is looking to open for open beta testing this summer. We are a Rom 2.4 based MUD that is heavily modified and based on a classic medieval fantasy setting in a completely unique world. We are class-less, alignment-less, and level-less, with heavy emphasis on character interaction and detail.

I thought I'd share the first chapter of this small story that's been in progress for the MUD though

I'm better known as Elanius in Advent, but I'll stick with Ophlia for these forums.

This is a great mud running here, seriously. The back story has been well thought out, for all things, all areas, even for the Gods, and the coding going into it is excellent and there's a great team of builders hard at work to open new areas. The imms are friendly and actually bother to care about the MUD and the players in it. We've got a whole team of dedicated newbie helpers. Even the newbie starting area is excellent and above all, it's not boring. We've even got a newbie help web page in the works, and this is just the starts of all of this.

Even though we are in testing stages still, the RPing here has been excellent. I've been RPing for many many years, and this is some of the best I've run into in a long time. It's been compelling, well thought out, and people are participating in it. And a lot of the RP is being generated by the players themselves.

And some of the best MUD management I've seen in a long time as well, so again, more praise to the Imms who are running this show.

Advent, though small, is well worth stopping in and just seeing what's up. As time goes on, Advent will expand to a very massive world, but for now, it's got a very good start on becoming one of the best MUDs out there. Or so I feel.

I too am a player of this mud. Quiet an interesting one. First of all ... it's an alpha. So theoretically it should lack a lot of things. Yet ... to my suprise, I found that it has (at times) more people then many other muds I know, that have been open for years, if not a decade.

It has a ... very unique system of advancement that got me hooked from pretty much ... the moment I read about it. Coming from a very intense roleplaying environment, I was looking for a mud that not only enforced roleplay, but encouraged it in such a matter that playing an interesting character was more profitable (advancement wise), then focusing all of your gameplay on training.

Advent is the first one who seemed to have managed to do this, without turning the mud into a mush. While you can still play a disciplined warrior, and dedicate time to training, aswell as reaping the usual rewards from that. It is still simply more sensable to be an interesting character and roleplay so you get the roleplaying rewards. And the fact that these rewards accumilate between characters, it is more then reasonable to be able to cook up competable characters right from the start. Without needing to create brand new (useless and defenseless) characters each time your previous one dies off. I wont release the details of the system, you have to play to see it. But I do wish to express my sheer excitement on how awesome the system is.

The playerbase is mature, and many of them are very impressive to play with.

The world is ... mmm. Cant say it's large, it's an alpha. I'm pretty sure there are dozens of areas out there that are simply not placed into the playable world yet. But for testing out there, there are just enough areas available. While this limits things, it's Alpha. Oddly enough, the previous mud I played had an opposite problem. They had a 'very' large gameworld, and a pretty limited playerbase, the result of which was ... veeeery little player to player interaction and roleplay. In Adventmud, the gameworld is big 'enough' to find loneliness or hide out (Oooh, you troublemakers!), and yet not small enough to 'never' meet people to interact with.

Anyway, in ... a year ? Maybe a little less, maybe a little more, I predict ... incredible popularity for that mud. It's system is impressive, their GMs are wicked ... err, I mean uhm ... helpful! Playerbase's interesting to love,hate, and ... you know ... frame, kidnap, and scheme against.